It’s unfortunate that a search for “C. E. Kelsey” in Google offers as the first result a webpage from Grinnell College because the webpage is riddled with inaccuracies. It is part of a student site featuring Carlos Montezuma’s correspondence. Montezuma’s papers contain only one letter from Kelsey, which offers limited information for a webpage. The letter appears to have been supplemented with fragmentary data about two different men named C. E. Kelsey found on various other websites and assembled in a haphazard fashion. The site does not invite feedback.
The quotes from Kelsey’s letter are essentially accurate (one word was missing from one of the two quotes). As agency clerk of the Green Bay Agency in Keshena, Wisconsin, Kelsey replied on October 10, 1892, to an inquiry that appears to have been sent by Montezuma to many Indian agencies. Years ago, when I viewed the microfilmed Papers of Carlos Montezuma, M.D. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1984) I did not find Montezuma’s letter to the Green Bay Agency, but I did find a letter by Montezuma to another US Indian agent on the same date (September 7, 1892) that requested a “list of returned Indian students or those who can speak and read the English language on your reservation.” Kelsey’s letter clearly responds to the same inquiry.
To put things straight, publisher Charles Edward Kelsey graduated from Amherst College in 1884. Indian agent Charles Edwin Kelsey was agency clerk at the Green Bay Agency in the early 1890s, then graduated with a law degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1896, and was first appointed as a special agent in San Jose, California in 1905. Kelsey gave a talk, “The Rights and Wrongs of the California Indians,” at the Commonwealth Club of California in 1909. The address was later published by the club as one of many articles in its transactions.
Kelsey compiled the first census of the nonreservation Indians of Northern California in 1905-06. I’m not sure whether the Grinnell site should say that he “helped to determine the number of Indians living in the U.S. that had no land to live on.” It implies a national effort to count landless Indians, and I can’t say definitively whether there was such an effort, but the idea draws attention away from the unique history and circumstances of Northern California’s native people.